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Uncle Sun wants you!

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” (Howard Beale, Network, 1976)

“You’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more!” (Jon Stewart, 2010)

The future foreseen by Howard Beale has come to pass. In the United States anyway. The question this weekend is, will it come to pass here too? Will Sun News Network become Canada’s bear-pit broadcaster? Can something like Fox cut the ice in Canada?

Beale, you may recall, was the crazed visionary/populist demagogue (played by Peter Finch) who hijacked hearts and minds in the 1976 movie Network.

He spoke to the little people by appealing to their basest instincts, and hijacked the American airwaves with his fulminating rants against the rich and powerful. Briefly anyway, the shtick made Beale exceedingly rich and plenty powerful. Then, like Glenn Beck appeared to last week when his chalkboard pulpit was pulled by Fox News, Beale fell.

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And this is the moment when Sun News, a self-professed “hard news and straight talk” network owned and operated by the Quebecor telecommunications conglomerate, has found itself on the air.

It has this mission: to cut through the “politically correct” fog perpetrated by the so-called “mainstream media” — which seems, in Sun Media terms, to be synonymous with the “state broadcaster” CBC, with its “unabashedly patriotic” programming aimed, in tried and true Beale-populist fashion, at the “average Canadian.”

On the network’s website, under the head “Controversially Canadian,” you’ll find this: “Canadians are tired of the same talking heads saying the same things on the same networks. Prime Time on Sun News Network will cut through the clutter. Colourful, intelligent commentary on the issues that actually matter to everyday working people.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because it loudly rings of Fox News, the once-upstart American news network that, with its signature blend of partisan red-meat conservatism, straight-talking angry heads and professed appeal to the interests of the “average American,” has risen to become the very mainstream media it once (and rather disingenuously still) positions itself against.

For its purposes, Sun News is similarly assuming the non-PC, unabashedly patriotic average Canuck is mad as hell and will not take it anymore. Or at least willing to watch professionally mad-as-hell people take it to the airwaves.

They may have a point.

“People are mad as hell and people have a right to be mad as hell,” says James Compton, an associate professor in the faculty of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario. He’s a professed “media junkie” who reads newspapers and watches TV news as much as the current 24-hour cycle will permit. He is also the author of several studies of the changing nature of news reporting in the Fox era.

“There are lots of reasons to be mad as hell,” he says. “People’s standard of living has been plummeting. People are poorer today than they were 10, 20 years ago in real dollars. People are squeezed. There’s not one breadwinner any more. Middle-class families usually have two people working. It’s harder. So that kind of message does resonate because there’s something real out there that makes people anxious and insecure.”

Since it came on the air in 1996, Fox News has been playing to those anxieties like a media-savvy maestro. But, as Compton points out, it neither invented those anxieties nor the emerging broadcasting context in which they could be so expertly exploited.

“That’s when they started to ramp up, when MSNBC and Fox News joined CNN,” he says. “So if you look back at the mourning of Diana, Monica-gate, Elian Gonzales (the boy caught in an international custody battle between the U.S. and Cuba) — these things just started to happen one after another and they got really big. And now with the addition of the Internet the 24-hour news cycle has ramped up even further.”

What Fox did, and what Sun News apparently hopes to do, is play out across that perpetual news spectacle stage by not simply reporting the news — or maybe not reporting it at all — but offering posture toward events that supplants content with tone, information with attitude, and facts (“hard” or otherwise) with opinion.

More than anything, this is Fox’s genius and legacy: the trumping of who-what-when-where-why by if-you-ask-me. Opinion not only plays out longer than facts and analysis, it’s cheap as hell. And in an environment of massive corporate media downsizing, when there’s more media but fewer media workers than ever, that’s value squared.

“Opinion is way cheaper,” Compton confirms. “ ... You just kind of play off the wire services if nothing else is happening and you can torque up whatever story you think might be able to kind of run the news cycle. And so that’s what Fox News has been doing and all 24-hour news channels do that to some extent but Fox has really made an art of it in a way.”

But it was an art practiced in a nurturing and well-primed environment. For all that Fox’s success can be attributed to economics, technology and timing, it also arrived smack in the middle of the most opportune historical moment. America had been swinging increasingly rightward since the 1970s, social programs had been eroding beneath supply-side economic policies, the middle class was bleeding and TV had already transformed politics from a form of transacted communal engagement to a personality-driven spectacle. Fox didn’t invent or invoke right-wing TV populism, it seized it and soared.

Which brings us back to Canada. Is this the moment for the Sun News Network to take off? Some indicators suggest it is.

For one thing, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have successfully been playing by the contemporary Republican playbook — playing hardball, invoking us-vs.-them patriotics and claiming to represent “average” Canadians — with demonstrable success, and Canadian politics itself has been accused of being considerably more personality-, photo-op- and spectacle-driven than ever before. Locally, the Rob Ford sweep to victory also suggests a heavy tilt rightward.

Moreover, it’s not as if Canada doesn’t have its own bully-pulpit media traditions: the Sun tabloids have been appealing to average-guy instincts for decades, and radio talk shows have ventilated citizen-generated steam for years. And how else do we account for Don Cherry?

But the risk is this: Despite its “unabashedly patriotic” stance, Sun News runs the risk of indulging something Canadians have a very long-standing and deeply-entrenched wariness of: becoming American.

“It still remains to be seen whether or not the country will embrace that approach,” says Compton.

“It’s not a done deal. There are some tendencies there, but at the same time Canadians still like to define themselves as primarily not being American.”

Still, there are those tendencies, and they suggest we may not be quite as not-American as we once were, or at least not in the same way. As the U.S. has swung more rightward, solipsistic, state-wary and less collective, we might well have too.

“I was kind of struck at the Conservative platform,” says Compton. “The so-called tax breaks, all these targeted things that allegedly allow individuals to make choices about their family’s future. That’s how people are now addressed constantly, and that’s how advertisers address us constantly. It’s one of the principal ways in which we are told that we relate to the world: as individuals who make consumer choices primarily.

“That’s anti-collective in a lot of ways. And a lot of the things that have helped define Canada away from the States, universal medicare being a big one, are collective ideas, and a lot of Canadians still buy into that. But it’s not like people haven’t been trying to chip away at that. So although there’s still strong belief in it, it’s been eroding.”

How much it has eroded, and to what extent Canadians are ready to act like Americans — or at least the Fox News approximation of acting like Americans — will play a key role in the successful selling of Sun TV’s hard news and straight talk stance. To fly, the network needs to be right in assuming we’re mad as hell. But not at it.

Who? The network’s architect is Kory Teneycke, a former spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Its best-known personality may be former CBC reporter Krista Erickson, who hosts a 3 p.m.-5 p.m. show called Canada Live. Former Miss Canada Neelam Verma handles an early morning news show, while Sun Media’s parliamentary bureau chief David Akin hosts a prime-time political show called Daily Brief.

Where? The service will be free to Shaw cable subscribers in Ontario and Western Canada, on Quebecor's own Vidéotron (Quebec's largest cable and Internet provider) and available elsewhere online or through direct request to cable providers.

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